Zora Neale Hurston Quotes - Page 6

Women forget all the things they don't want to remember, and remember everything they don't want to forget.

She often spoke to falling seeds and said, "Ah hope you fall on soft ground," because she had heard seeds saying that to each other as they passed. The familiar people and things had failed her so she hung over the gate and looked up the road towards way off. She knew now that marriage did not make love. Janie's first dream was dead, so she became a woman.

Love, I find, is like singing.

It's a funny thing, the less people have to live for, the less nerve they have to risk losing nothing.

Her old thoughts were going to come in handy now, but new words would have to be made and said to fit them.

Most things are born in the mothering darkness and most things die. Darkness is the womb of creation, my boy. But the sun with his seven horns of flame is the father of life.

The game of keeping what one has is never so exciting as the game of getting.

She was saving up feelings for some man she had never seen.

She had an inside and an outside now and suddenly she knew how not to mix them.

When a man keeps beating me to the draw mentally, he begins to get glamorous.

If you kin see de light at daybreak, you don't keer if you die at dusk. It's so many people never seen de light at all.

I had hundreds of books under my skin already. Not selected reading, all of it. Some of it could be called trashy. I had been through Nick Carter, Horatio Alger, Bertha M. Clay and the whole slew of dime novelists in addition to some really constructive reading. I do not regret the trash. It has harmed me in no way. It was a help, because acquiring the reading habit early is the important thing. Taste and natural development will take care of the rest later on.

It is one of the blessings of this world that few people see visions and dream dreams.

My head was full of misty fumes of doubt.

When we sing the blues, we're singin' out our hearts, we're singing out our feelings. Maybe we're hurt and just can't answer back, then we sing or maybe even hum the blues.

But for the national welfare, it is urgent to realize that the minorities do think, and think about something other than the race problem.

Janie looked down on him and felt a self-crushing love. So her soul crawled out from its hiding place.

...she woke up in time to see the sun sending up spies ahead of him to mark out the road through the dark. He peeped up over the door sill of the world and made a little foolishness with red.

Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board.

Two things everybody's got tuh do fuh theyselves. They got tuh go tuh God, and they got tuh find out about livin' fuh theyselves.

She's got those big black eyes with plenty shiny white in them that makes them shine like brand new money and she knows what God gave women eyelashes for, too. Her hair is not what you might call straight. It's negro hair, but it's got a kind of white flavor. Like the piece of string out of a ham. It's not ham at all, but it's been around ham and got the flavor.

Love, I find, is like singing. Everybody can do enough to satisfy themselves, though it may not impress the neighbors as being very much.

Look lak she been livin' through uh hundred years in January without one day of spring.

The inference is, that God has restated the superiority of the West. God always does like that when a thousand white people surround one dark one. Dark people are always "bad" when they do not admit the Divine Plan like that. A certain Javanese man who sticks up for Indonesian Independence is very lowdown by the papers, and suspected of being a Japanese puppet.

Gods always love the people who make 'em.